Chavez Rails Against Playstation’s Capitalist Agenda

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez used his weekly radio-and-television address this week to lambaste Sony’s Playstation gaming console. Violent video games—any games that “bomb cities or just throw bombs”—are sold by capitalist countries so they can “later sell weapons,” he said. (They also “promote the need for cigarettes, drugs and alcohol so they can sell them”.) Such games have been illegal in Venezuela since October, when a law passed that made their sale punishable by up to five years in jail. Chavez has previously criticized Nintendo for promoting “selfishness, individualism and violence”.

Of course, there’s something personal here. “Those games they call ‘PlayStation’ are poison,” he said. “Some games teach you to kill. They once put my face on a game, ‘you’ve got to find Chavez to kill him.'”